Maximum number of images in a gallery

StevenV

What's the max number of images you'd put in a gallery?

Note that I'm NOT asking a technical question of how many can be uploaded or displayed.

I'm asking how many YOU, the photographer (and hopefully photograph-seller) would put in? How many 'pages' do you think most people would be willing to scroll through to find that one image they want to buy?

flyingdutchie

StevenV wrote:

What's the max number of images you'd put in a gallery?

Note that I'm NOT asking a technical question of how many can be uploaded or displayed.

I'm asking how many YOU, the photographer (and hopefully photograph-seller) would put in? How many 'pages' do you think most people would be willing to scroll through to find that one image they want to buy?

There is no easy answer to this question.

If you have only 10 pictures to sell, then you show only 10. If you have a 1000 pictures that you want to sell, then you have to show those 1000 pictures. If you have a 10000 pictures that you want to sell, then you have to show those 10000 pictures... The question is now how to sort/distribute those pictures over your gallery/galleries.

This is what i would do:
If you have a few pics, dump them into one gallery, best ones first.

If you have a lot of pics, make sure the person who is viewing your pics can search for them (easily): divvy them up in categories/subjects and spread your pics over the galleries according to your categories/subjects; add keywords to your pictures;

If you don't have an easy way for people to search through your pictures and you have a lot of pictures, it does not matter how many pictures you have in each gallery... 100 galleries with 10 pics or 10 galleries with 100 pics... the viewer has still a LOT of browsing to do...

-- Anton.

flyingdutchie

StevenV wrote:

What's the max number of images you'd put in a gallery?

Note that I'm NOT asking a technical question of how many can be uploaded or displayed.

I'm asking how many YOU, the photographer (and hopefully photograph-seller) would put in? How many 'pages' do you think most people would be willing to scroll through to find that one image they want to buy?

Steven, i may have found a problem with your site:

The text on your site is rather hard or impossible to read. At least on IE5.5 .. i have not tested using IE6.0.
Your home-page has a black background and your text-color is black as well.
Other pages have some black text under a dark-green background. This is also hard to read.

If this happens on IE5.5 only, then there is no problem. But you may want to check it out on various other browser if this problem happens or not. Just a head's up
-- Anton.

StevenV

flyingdutchie wrote:

Your home-page has a black background and your text-color is black as well.
Other pages have some black text under a dark-green background. This is also hard to read.

Anton, thanks for letting me know. I've never seen it as I've tested w/IE6 and Firefox. $#%@!!! IE 5.5

I've just changed my css to have white text on black (or my dark green grass) background everywhere, I've removed any other references to other colors. If you've got a chance to take a look again, I'd appreciate it.

flyingdutchie

StevenV wrote:

Anton, thanks for letting me know. I've never seen it as I've tested w/IE6 and Firefox. $#%@!!! IE 5.5

I've just changed my css to have white text on black (or my dark green grass) background everywhere, I've removed any other references to other colors. If you've got a chance to take a look again, I'd appreciate it.

If it works in IE6.0, i would not worry too much about it. IE5.x is no longer officially supported by Smugmug... less than 5% of the hits are IE5.5 (IE5.0 much much much less than that).

I tested it on IE5.5... still black text on black background <img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6029383/emoji/headscratch.gif&quot; border="0" alt="" > . I tried to fiddle with some CSS to fix this on your site (AIS Web Accessibility Toolbar), but i can't fix it. IE5.5 has a bug in it, i think. It only happens on text of non-visited <a> links.... Text in visited <a> links does show up correctly in white color in IE5.5...
-- Anton.

behr655

StevenV wrote:

What's the max number of images you'd put in a gallery?

Note that I'm NOT asking a technical question of how many can be uploaded or displayed.

I'm asking how many YOU, the photographer (and hopefully photograph-seller) would put in? How many 'pages' do you think most people would be willing to scroll through to find that one image they want to buy?

I don't have a pro account but I've noticed when I check the stats of a gallery that views trail off as the page numbers climb.
I might suggest that you limit your galleries to 2 or 3 pages and group simular photos together. Of course put the best photos first.

Bear

RichS

If I read it correctly, the question is home many pictures in a single gallery, not how many total on the site.

I'd try to keep it a 4 pages max, 64 pictures, if feasible. A couple levels of hierarchy to navigate through, say 16 branches at each level, would enable 16,384 pictures in this type of a structure.

Of course, the higher level navigation could be kept to simple text instead of thumbnails, or text and a single picture of the selected event to confirm. If you are posting shots from a few hundred events, just a listing, sorted by date, listing the type event and keyword/name, would suffice. Everyone doesn't need to see a thumbnail of 200 weddings on a site.

Just my personal experience - I'm OK with 3 pages, 4 starts pushing it, and I get tired with 5 (actually, I just look at one or two and move on)

StevenV

Thanks, guys, that was the sort of input I was looking for.

I'm struggling with a large event from this weekend. Obviously 1700 images in one gallery wasn't going to work. I was able to break it along fairly natural boundaries by school (this was a marching band competition) and then by their morning and afternoon performances, so most of the galleries ended up in the 90-140 image range. That's still larger than I'd like (and which seems to be confirmed as "too large" by opinion here too), but I'm hoping that little Johnny's parents will be willing to search through at least once to find pictures of their kid.

I guess I just shoot too much, or at least keep too many, but I opperate on the assumption that parents would rather have a less-than-perfect picture of their kid than no picture at all.

jfriend

Some thoughts on organizing the display for a large event

StevenV wrote:

Thanks, guys, that was the sort of input I was looking for.

I'm struggling with a large event from this weekend. Obviously 1700 images in one gallery wasn't going to work. I was able to break it along fairly natural boundaries by school (this was a marching band competition) and then by their morning and afternoon performances, so most of the galleries ended up in the 90-140 image range. That's still larger than I'd like (and which seems to be confirmed as "too large" by opinion here too), but I'm hoping that little Johnny's parents will be willing to search through at least once to find pictures of their kid.

I guess I just shoot too much, or at least keep too many, but I opperate on the assumption that parents would rather have a less-than-perfect picture of their kid than no picture at all.

I've shot events like school talent shows with photos from multiple photographers all going online (2000 photos).

THE way to think about this is "how are my viewers going to find what they are looking for?". Only an extremely motivated viewer is going to wade through hundreds of photos to find what they need. So, you need to make it easy for them to narrow it down to the gallery that their photos are in and where in that gallery the photos they want are.

For the talent show, we had an easy Act 1, Scene 1 chronology to follow and I labelled each Scene with the name of the act. This way the parents could easily just scan the list of galleries to find the one that contained the scene their kids was in. And, it was all in chronological order so if they knew their kid's act was near the end, they could only look there. I try to keep it to less than 50 photos per gallery and ideally even smaller than that.

The whole goal for me was to make it easy for the viewers to find only the photos they were interested in without having to wade through many they weren't.

If you have photos of a band competition, then you probably want to put them into galleries by band and organize the bands chronologically. If you know the names of the schools, you can name the galleries by school, put them all into a custom category called something like "Band Competition 2005" and you are basically done.

Within a gallery, you might want to think about putting the best photos at the start of the gallery. Viewers will see the photos on the first page of the gallery a lot more often than the last page of the gallery, so as long as changing the chronology within a gallery doesn't hurt the organization, that's usually a good thing to do.

If you have a lot of photos that all look the same, you may want to save your viewers some time and just pick the best ones of a set and leave the others out. Great photographers (of which I am not) only exhibit their best work.

--John

gouldphoto

Gallery Sizes

StevenV wrote:

What's the max number of images you'd put in a gallery?

Note that I'm NOT asking a technical question of how many can be uploaded or displayed.

I'm asking how many YOU, the photographer (and hopefully photograph-seller) would put in? How many 'pages' do you think most people would be willing to scroll through to find that one image they want to buy?

Steven,
As an example, this past weekend I shot an event and came back with 1500+ usable images. I get to sort these images by date and class (drag racing).
I end up with 6 to 9 galleries per sub-category, and no matter what it's still alot of photos to browse through. Even with that sort I will sometimes end up with over 200 images in a gallery. And as commented on above, the deeper into the gallery you look at stats, the lower the hit count.

But I have found when a person is looking for a shot of themself or something important to them, they will browse through absolutely everything you have.

I guess there is no good answer, alot of photos is alot of photos.

Organize as best you can and hope the people find what they are looking for.

Steve G
www.gouldphoto.com

ksgkphoto

A followon question to this thread
I'm going to resurrect this thread...

I recently shot 1200 images of some walkers at a sponsored walk.

I use "Jalbum" and my own hosted site to display these images...

http://ksgkphoto.com/20090911_mswalk/

My solution to the "too many pages dilemma" was to have longer pages...
if you can put 40 odd images on a long page thats easier that having to keep clicking to refresh the page...

everyone should have a scroll wheel by now and thats easy...

Heres my question.. "Is there a method to change the number of images per page in a gallery?"

thanks

K

I'm about to go pro smugger.. 5 days left on the trial...

jfriend

ksgkphoto wrote:

Heres my question.. "Is there a method to change the number of images per page in a gallery?"

There is no way to control it. In the default Smugmug view, the number of thumbs is determined based on the size of your browser window. First, space is reserved for the largest main image that will fit (leaving room for both portrait and landscape images) and then the remaining space is filled with thumbnails. The design goal is to have no scrolling either vertically or horizontally. Smugmug offers other views (like all thumbs) that can show lots of thumbs, but none of them give you the control over how many per page.